Asia & the Pacific

"Belfer Center Newsmakers" highlights members of the Belfer Center community who have been featured recently in the news.

Cyber Security Project Director Michael Sulmeyer and Project Affiliate Amy Chang discuss their observations on China's Approach to cyber after a recent visit to Beijing. Sulmeyer and Chang were part of a small group of American academics and goernment representatives to meet with Chinese counterparts about contemporary issues in cybersecurity.

Russian cyber operations against the United States aim to both collect information and develop offensive capabilities against future targets. Washington must strengthen its defenses in response.

"But what about deterring operations that are not equivalent to an armed attack? There are grey areas in which important targets, say, a free political process, are not strategically vital in the same way as the electrical grid or the financial system. Destroying the latter two could damage lives and property; interference with the former threatens deeply held political values."

This paper addresses a growing concern to one of the most fundamental components of our democracy: how cybersecurity risks can influence the integrity of our elections.

"As the U.S. Congress considers the appropriate role for the federal government in the encryption debate, policymakers should be mindful of the impact of their actions both within and beyond the United States. To date, the U.S. and Europe are on one side of an Internet governance spectrum favoring the multi-stakeholder status quo with India in the middle, followed by China, and Russia undertaking the most state-centric approach to both Internet governance generally and encryption specifically."